Monday 25 / November / 2024
Muscat: Huawei's cyber-security chief John Suffolk said that the tech giant had never been asked by China or any other government to "do anything untoward".
Suffolk said, "Huawei welcomes outsiders to analyse its products and detect engineering or coding flaws."
"We stand naked in front of the world, but we would prefer to do that, because it enables us to improve our products,” he said.
He added: "We want people to find things, whether they find one or one thousand, we don't care. We are not embarrassed by what people find."
The US has encouraged its allies to block Huawei - the world's largest maker of telecoms equipment - from their 5G networks, saying the Chinese government could use its products for surveillance.
"We've never had a request from the Chinese government to do anything untoward at all,” Suffolk said.
"We have never been asked by the Chinese government or any other government, I might add, to do anything that would weaken the security of a product."
Suffolk also stressed that Huawei is a provider of telecommunications equipment to mobile network operators.
"We don't run networks, and because we don't run the network, we have no access to any of the data that is running across that network," he said.
He also explained that Huawei is only one of about 200 vendors who would be providing various different bits of equipment that would eventually make up a 5G network in the UK.
However, if an operator were to have a problem with Huawei equipment, a support centre based in Romania would be able to remotely access the equipment to fix the problem.
Suffolk explained that mobile phone technology requires the mobile operator to constantly track a user's phone, in order to be able to connect them to the mobile network.
Only about 30 per cent of the the components in Huawei products are actually made by the company - the rest of the components are obtained from a global supply chain that Huawei closely monitors in order to prevent security breaches.
